Crystal Crisis

Genre: Match-3 Falling Block Puzzle

Players: 1-4 Competitive (Local)

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Review:

Crystal Crisis is a Puzzle game in the falling block/color-matching variety, with a lot of similarities to games like Puyo Puyo and Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo. As such, it’s a game with a focus on battling, pitting up to 4 players against one another.

Players will get to choose between an eclectic array of characters including the heroes of Cave Story, Binding of Isaac, and Astro Boy, to name a few. Yeah, it’s an odd grouping, and it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, but it’s cool nonetheless that some of these characters are in the game.

Visually, the game looks… surprisingly good for a puzzle game, actually. The characters are rendered in detailed 3D, with unique animations and a solid framerate. Oh, and also you’re matching gems on a screen, which looks fine. Yeah, the priorities here definitely seem skewed to highlight the array of licensed characters… and actually, that’s a bit of a problem.

See, because the game is making use of some pretty good graphics to render these characters, load times in between matches are ridiculous. I can’t remember the last time I had to put up with loading times this bad in a puzzle game.

What’s more, the gameplay itself is a bit frustrating, with players stacking up colored blocks until the appearance of crystal blocks to clear them… but since the appearance of crystals is random (and frustratingly uncommon), it feels like far too much of the gameplay is down to luck of the draw.

In the end, Crystal Crisis feels like a game where the developers were really trying hard for something ambitious, but where all of the effort poured into it went in the wrong places. Instead of focusing on fun gameplay and smooth transitions between matches, the focus seems to be on making all the licensed characters look good. Thanks, but if given the choice, I’d rather have an uglier game that plays well.

tl;dr – Crystal Crisis is a Puzzle game that has some similarities to Puyo Puyo and Super Puzzle Fighter, but while it has some nice graphics, the gameplay relies too much on luck and the loading screens between matches are absolutely absurd.

Grade: C-

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